A Little Something Sweeney: Family. Friends. Fiction. Food.

You and me and the Devil do NOT make three. I am not a witchy woman. What is with the people this week? Answer: They are no longer people. They have turned into a hideous sub-species of perpetual drunkards. I don´t know if the people who are telling me I´m a blond American devil are drunk or just crazy. Yesterday, Sunday, the supposed day of the Lord (go figure), is when people started freaking out on me. One bearded gentleman (why do most of them have beards?) started chasing us with his big metal pole telling me I´m the devil, so I ignored him and entered in my apartment complex. He left me alone. As Hna. Paus and I, later that day, were walking up to the craziest street in this entire country, the Dr. Defillo, when I lady with Medusa-like hair and milk streaming from her mouth yelled for us to cross to the other side of the road, because, you guessed it, I´m a giant devil. I think she had me confused for someone else... but anyway, I couldn´t help but think how lucky I am not to h

Remember that time when everything is different than how it used to be? Yeah.... But sometimes that´s good and sometimes that´s bad. How profound. But, as Jesus was know to do now and then, he gave some good insight into the human condition when he observed that no one who has old wine will automatically want new wine because they will claim the old is better. He was referring to the new, higher, better law he had brought to the people to replace the Law of Moses. But it can be applied to any other life change as well. We seem to either want to cling to past traditions/habits, even if there is obviously a better way presented to us, or sometimes we take the opposite stratagem and try to abandon everything, hoping that going to a new place, starting over, whatever, will make everything from a shattered past become a forgotten memory. However, I think the real trick is, unshockingly, finding a happy balance between the two. Forgiving, forgetting, and moving forward, but remembering that

Howdy Partners. This is your capitán speaking. Well, capitána. But the feminist in me refuses to acknowledge the genderizing of nouns and verbs. Which means I may be doomed to have terrible grammar, but at least I´ll be getting my point across, even if I´m the only one who knows it. Anyway, as some of you may already know/taken for granted, this week was the great big day of thanks. And I feel quite ashamed of how I have been mistreating my American roots this week. I just realized that for 6 months, o sea, half a year, I have been living with pure Latins. What? How? So this week has been quite an adjustment for me, because I now have another American in the house, Hermana Dawe. Which means i´ve been speaking a whole pile of English. I can´t even stop it. It is English-rrhea, which is a lot better than the real thing. And because she only has a couple transfers in the field, she´s been able to catch me up on some of the stuff I´ve been missing over the last, oh you know, 16 MONTHS